There’s an uncomfortable penance to lingering in rooms that seem as unending as the amount of bottles you’ve drank or pills you’ve swallowed, or perhaps the inexplicable feelings of nothingness and everything hovering indefinitely.

You attempt to discern what exactly it is about twisting a cap or hearing the all too familiar sound of liquid hitting the bottom of a dirty glass muddled with fingerprints that become the blueprint of the cliche.

Sensory deprivation, taking out the trash hurts your eyes. Fresh air smells like a peculiar waft of normalcy that you’ve never quite been acquainted with. If you had been buried like an artifact someone just unearthed.

He says we’re both missing that spark normal have

We argue in the car for hours I’m going to leave you today if you don’t stop.

Now I’m betrayed. I ruminate over hotel choices in a sun baked car as he blathers on, taunting me. I won’t give him a sufficient answer because he’s never really given me a fulfilling one. Instinctively I am juvenile, precocious I call it.